Man uses Astra to find a C.IA backdoor into Samsung televisions. Gets banned by OpenAI within 24 hours.

Reservation and the SC/ST atrocity act is a curse upon this nation. They took away the life of Sahil Wakode. Let me explain why I say this. I too have studied at one of India's premier institutions, and I saw something that people are often unwilling to discuss honestly. There can be an enormous academic gulf between students sitting in the same classroom. This does not necessarily mean that one group is hardworking and the other is not. Some of the students who struggled the most were also among the hardest-working. The uncomfortable truth is that human ability has natural limits. The human brain, like the human body, differs from person to person. Exercise cannot turn every man into an Olympic athlete, and effort cannot give every student the same aptitude for mathematics, abstraction or rapid learning. Hard work can take a person a very long way, but it cannot abolish differences in innate ability. Yet modern Indian society refuses to accept this simple fact. Modern Indian parents are taught to believe that hard work is the answer to everything. When a child struggles, they do not ask whether the child has reached the limits of his particular aptitude. They tell him to work harder. They beat him, shame him, compare him with other children and make him believe that failure is a moral defect. This becomes particularly vicious when education is treated as a matter of family honour and social status. And then we take a student who might have been perfectly capable of succeeding in an ordinary college, place him in an extraordinarily competitive institution through a reservation system, and surround him with students selected from an entirely different academic distribution. What happens next? The student does not suddenly become stupid. He is simply competing in an environment in which the relative gap between him and his classmates may be enormous. He works harder and harder, yet continues to see others effortlessly doing what takes him hours. His marks remain low. His confidence collapses. And because this is India, marks are not merely marks. They become a public measure of intelligence, worth and family prestige. The student begins to believe that everyone around him is discovering what his parents refuse to admit: that he cannot keep up. That is where reservation becomes cruel. Had the same student entered a college whose academic level was closer to his own preparation and aptitude, he might have been an average student instead of a perpetual failure. He might have competed with his classmates, made friends, succeeded at something and left college with his confidence intact. Instead, our caste-based admission system can put him into an elite environment where the academic mismatch becomes a source of constant humiliation, while the surrounding culture tells him that there is no legitimate explanation for his struggle except that he has not worked hard enough. This constant humiliation makes him resort to desperate measures like cheating. This is not compassion. It is cruelty disguised as social justice. And there is another poisonous consequence. Once caste becomes institutionalized in admissions and discipline, every academic dispute can acquire a caste dimension. The student sees himself as a victim of caste. The institution becomes afraid of appearing casteist. Teachers become conscious of the SC/ST machinery hanging over every interaction. Resentment grows on all sides. Reservation and SC/ST atrocity act is breaking India

Update: IIT Bombay professor announced his resignation.

JUST IN: Multiple world leaders have reportedly fallen ill, after attending BRICS summit in India.

Dr. Pratosh at IISc Bengaluru tells his students that rapid advances in AI are commoditizing intellectual labour. He raises an unsettling question: if companies stop recruiting on campus in the next 5–10 years—even at India’s top universities—what will the purpose of a university education be ? A must watch video for everyone in tech

After a horrible July (down ~6%), the momentum algorithm has started up by ~3.9% over the first three days of August so far. Snapshot of today's top three winners. (No Recommendation) Some learnings/insights (No Recommendation): 1. Exited MtarTech on the third consecutive lower circuit, which seems to be a mistake in hindsight. Cutting winners (had multi-bagged) and keeping losers is like cutting flowers and watering weeds. Lesson learnt! 2. Recent entry in BlueStone has done well in week 1. Rest, seems momentum fizzled out of STYL, BALAMINES, SCHNEIDER, KALYAN, and Cartrade. Let's see if August has some momentum runners because July had all momentum from the market sapped. Looks like July was a step back before a grand leap in August-September?

>math professor spends a year on one of the hardest unsolved problems in math >"Navier-Stokes" >his drafts for the whole project went through codex sessions >openai had his logs in codex >suddenly rumor leaks AI solved it >he emails openai to ask what's going on >openai calls within days >"funny story, our model also solved it" >using his exact approach >asks openai: did you train on my sessions? >no answer

With regards to the previous tweet on the Riemann Hypothesis. A guy who prompted 'you can do it' to Claude while jogging is responsible for the leap on the famous math problem. Not a mathematician or an academician. What comes next is what? SMEs stop existing, and we see AI as an expert. Exciting times to live in for sure. #Riemann #ClayInstitute

BREAKING: Uber, $UBER, is laying off 10% of its employees in a massive restructuring effort aimed at reducing costs. The layoffs will impact a total of 3,300 people and will reduce the number of managers in the company by 20%. The move comes as Uber has vowed to commit more than $10 billion to robotaxi partnerships in the coming years.

The anti-reservation protests in Delhi present a difficult vote-bank Catch-22, but the underlying debate is important. Merit-and merit alone-should determine opportunity. The US and China aren't marginally ahead of India; in many areas, they're miles ahead. We cannot afford to dilute merit by 50% year after year and expect to close that gap. Economic reservation isn't a clean solution either, especially in a system where income criteria can be circumvented. Support disadvantaged students through better schooling, scholarships and fee concessions-but keep selection merit-based. Reservation should be completely abolished. #ReservationReformआंदोलन #ReservationHatao

There we go. An investment bank confirms. But the food crisis is not going to be just due to fertilizer shortage. I know India is already ramping up imports of urea etc. Still it may not be enough. As I had outlined in my post, it will be a manufactured crisis blamed on natural factors and the supply chain. The food crisis will be precipitated to weaken democracies like India by turning people against the government. Using personal issues like inflation and food scarcity amplified with narrative warfare. This is why it is important for India to start preparing now. Increase the already high buffer stocks, but more importantly prevent sabotages to them by 0.5 front commies and radicals, tighten loopholes in exports, prepare for better coast guard and customs to prevent smuggling out etc. And the most important preparation India needs to do to maintain stability will be in narrative. Both in preemptive narrative and in fighting fake narrative & cognitive warfare once the crisis starts.

Image from Bloomberg: Circular nature of AI Investments. Until the moat around AI becomes clearer and, more importantly, the economic value expands well beyond the companies building and financing the infrastructure, the argument that AI is a bubble isn't going away. Models keep improving with every iteration, but much of that improvement is not meaningfully felt outside a fraction of users. The AI race may not be running out of innovation. But it could be running out of time to prove itself legit? #AI #AIBubble